'Plant Pirates' Threaten Rare Australian Tree
3/10/00
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: 'Plant pirates' threaten rare Australian tree
Source: London Observer Service
Status: Copyright 2000, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: March 10, 2000
Byline: Ben Sandilands
SYDNEY, Australia - Australian National Park rangers have tightened
security in a wilderness reserve near Sydney in a bid to keep a group
of foreign rare plant collectors from raiding the home of the Wollemi
Pine, one of world's rarest trees.
Only a cluster of 40 Wollemis grow in the wild in a secret corner of
a chaotic "lost world" of deep, thin canyons that crease an ancient
eroded tableland about 55 miles northwest of Australia's largest
city.
Authorized visitors to the Wollemis sanctuary have to change into
sterile clothing and footwear on the edge of a high cliff before
descending to the site. According to Ken Hill, senior botanist at the
Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney, "One wrong step could contaminate
the trees with modern pathogens for which they may have no defense
and wipe out an astonishing opportunity to time travel to an earlier
ecology."
Hill was attending a conifer conference in Britain when he learned
that a team of adventurous German plant collectors had uncovered the
map coordinates of the Wollemis and planned to "drop in" this year.
The National Parks and Wildlife Service in the state of New South
Wales, concerned by reports that the German group regards
"regulation-busting" as part of the thrill of the trip, has drawn up
a contingency plan and alerted the Australian Customs and Immigration
service to watch for illegal exports of native plants and animals by
freight, mail and personal carriage.
Australian courts have jailed or fined dozens of visitors in recent
years for "wildlife" smuggling. The parks service conducts routine
patrols through the Wollemi area and has set up a network of contacts
with the isolated homesteads along the four-wheel drive tracks that
bring visitors. Helicopter access is difficult, and television crews
taken to the area have been blindfolded during the flights in and
out.
Some officials take comfort from the area's natural defenses. "I
wouldn't be surprised if we ended up having to rescue ( the
invaders)," said a spokesman for the national parks service. "This is
very dangerous terrain to traverse."
Until six years ago, the Wollemi was thought to have been extinct for
about 65 million years, or around the time the dinosaurs disappeared.
Then, in 1994, a party of explorers made what was probably the first
human entry on foot into one of the hundreds of canyons in the area.
One of them, park ranger David Noble, said, "This spikey, furry-
looking thing with bubbly bark stuck up above the surrounding trees."
Noble, whose party had reached the spot by abseiling down waterfalls
and swimming through subterranean natural tunnels, instantly knew
that the alien form matched none of the indigenous or introduced
plants he was trained to recognize.
The fossils and leaves he collected were found to match imprints that
had been turned into rocks 60 million-150 million years ago, long
before the first people walked the Earth.
These were, it was realized, the last living fragments of vast
forests of Wollemis that flourished across Gondwanaland, the super
continent that included Australia, Antarctica, South Africa and South
America.
Since then, Wollemia nobilis has yielded some secrets. The colony
appears to vary in age between 500-1,000 years. All of the wild trees
are genetically identical to each other, having perfected inbreeding
to a state that only cloning could imitate. Thousands of them are now
thriving "in captivity" and have started producing pollen and seed
cones.
Australian botanists plan to ensure the survival of the species by
releasing about two million trees a year to the public beginning in
2005. Researchers say they have barely begun to understand the nature
of the trees and the ecological niche in which they have survived the
passing of epochs.